Reap the Hot September Harvest: Book 1: Desiree

By Harry w. Kendall

The novel is a MLK trilogy, titled Reap the Hot September Harvest. It is literature of the Civil Rights Movement’s history and has a broad appeal to America at large.
On Mother’s Day, 1960, after meeting MLK in Atlanta, Desiree—the title of Book One—and the Freedom Riders are attacked by the Klan in Anniston, AL. Did she faint, or die and return? Is she the reason an elderly Black vet of WWII kills himself? Answers are revealed and rejected. Treatments fail, years pass, desperation sets in. Then, Desiree meets a young minister returning from Egypt with spiritual enlightenment he garnered from an ancient scribe of God’s philosophy. Desiree, now a yoga adept, is intrigued. He claims they are missing links in Blacks’ religious practices, and can demystify the mythology of white supremacy. Her feelings soar, but she soundly rejects his ugly denunciation of Blacks’ force fed Christianity. The minister’s rebound kindles a hasty romance. Desiree purrs, “Why am I a flower of sacrifice.” “Flowers nourish the soul, sacrifice means atonement.” Enduring moments, strumming her heart strings with spiels like why African-Americans are proponents of jazz, ripens her for the obvious question. Desiree resists; she is not ready to reveal her dark side. The reverend persists, and says he is the chosen pastor of a church in a small Southern town. It promises a chance to establish the MLK Center of Social Awareness and Spirituality, make MLK’s Promised Land a reality.
In Book Two we read the reverend’s story, while Desiree arranges to relocate, become a pastor’s wife and teach yoga.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781532091056

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Copyright © 2020 Harry W. Kendall.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Certain characters in this work are historical figures, and certain events portrayed did take place. However, this is a work of fiction. All of the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-9106-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-9107-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-9105-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020904710

iUniverse rev. date: 03/31/2020

WE WILL NEVER FORGET

I wrote this novel in honor of the legion of courageous Freedom Riders. Their psychic energy kept the flame kindled in me while I studied their selfless contributions and carved out this story. These words represent my best effort to articulate my gratitude and acknowledgment of their perilous and supreme sacrifices.

William Barbee, Nashville, Tennessee

Frances and Walter Bergman, Detroit, Michigan

Albert Bigelow, Cos Cob, Connecticut

Edward Blankenheim, Tucson, Arizona

Paul Brooks, East Saint Louis, Illinois

Catherine Burks, Birmingham, Alabama

Carl Bush, Memphis, Tennessee

Charles Butler, Charleston, South Carolina

Joseph Carter, Brooklyn, New York

Alan Cason Jr., Orlando, Florida

Lucretia Collins, El Paso, Texas

Benjamin E. Cox, High Point, North Carolina

James Farmer, New York, New York

Rudolph Graham, Chattanooga, Tennessee

Robert G. Griffin, Tampa, Florida

William Harbour, Piedmont, Alabama

Herman Harris, Englewood, New Jersey

Susan Herman, Whittier, California

Genevieve Hughes, Washington, D.C.

Patricia Jenkins, Nashville, Tennessee

Bernard Lafayette Jr., Tampa, Florida

Frederick Leonard, Chattanooga, Tennessee

John R. Lewis, Troy, Alabama

Salynn McCollum, Snyder, New York

Jimmy McDonald, New York, New York

William Mitchell Jr., Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Ivor Moore, the Bronx, New York

Mae F. Moultrie, Sumter, South Carolina

James Peck, New York, New York

Joseph Perkins, Owensboro, Kentucky

Charles Person, Atlanta, Georgia

Isaac Reynolds, Detroit, Michigan

Etta Simpson, Nashville, Tennessee

Ruby Smith, Atlanta, Georgia

Henry Thomas, Saint Augustine, Florida

Susan Wilbur, Nashville, Tennessee

Clarence Wright, Nashville, Tennessee

Jim Zwerg, Beloit, Wisconsin

Among the list of more than four hundred Freedom Rider champions for justice, these thirty-eight were victims of the Mother’s Day massacre that occurred in April 1961 in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama. They were on board the Trailways and Greyhound buses. Their valor inspired me to give the protagonist in Book I the name Desiree. To Ye Scribe she personifies beauty, love, strength of spirit, and indomitable perseverance.

ENDORSEMENTS

In Reap the Hot September Harvest, Harry Kendall deftly navigates contested contexts of time, space, and place with the precision of reported observation and storytelling of a community’s griot. We are enriched within and through these iterative moments, narratives of and as movement(s) passed across more than sixty years and long before that, and across physical, song- and spirit-filled, and social geographies collectively tracing and bearing witness to a corridor of simultaneous hope and the hoped for, from the Deep South to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and back. Kendall compels us at once to travel and dwell, to sojourn with this historicizing, acutely necessary in our contemporary time: he writes stories with a black literary and African Diasporic tradition of authors who locate us alongside characters and in texts spanning powerful genres of prose, song, and the historical present to envision possibilities in the interactions of equality, action taking, and love, expressed intergenerationally as individual and collective imaginaries of lives lived and complicated in desires for envisaged pasts, presents, and futures, and in outcomes unanticipated.

—Dr. Vaughn W. M. Watson, Assistant Professor of

English Education, Michigan State University

In part love story, in part a deep-felt reflection on the painful milestones of the civil rights movement, Harry Kendall’s Reap the Hot September Harvest is ultimately a novel of ideas—an erudite and compelling meditation on the path from oppressive religious practice to true spiritual freedom.

—J. E. Fishman, author of Primacy and The Dark Pool

Reap the Hot September Harvest takes you on an exciting and historical journey from the rural South to the land of the pyramids. Kendall reaches beyond civil rights activists and historians in this book.

—Dr. Ernie Wade, former Director of Multicultural

Affairs, Wake Forest University

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this novel has been a metaphysical odyssey. More than writing holistically, as the thought processes meshed, it never ceased demanding that I rise spiritually in sync with the story’s arc. I still hear those voices appealing for a sustained level of intellect, though I have been ever mindful of the value of simplicity.

I could not have completed this work alone. Thank you, Alma Hairston, Robert Garwood, Joel Fishman, Susan Hacker, Gary Smith, Dorothy Graham Leverett, Judith Burgess, US Navy Lieutenant Commander Cheryl Hawthorne, Karen Duran, Mitchell Kendall and Professor Emeritus Ernest Wade of Wake Forest University.

Without the solid support system—my wife, Shirley Sharp-Kendall; Maria Tommasini; Denice Waite Gertrude Simmons; and Scott Allen—I would have achieved little beyond the first draft. Thank you for bolstering my confidence to stay with my original decision to write this book as a work of fiction from a distinct historical perspective.

Grateful recognition to Dr. Mervat Nasser, founder and director of New Hermopolis and the Djehutihotep Cultural Center in Egypt, for use of copyrighted material in the World Memory, the Corpus Hermeticum, and the photo of Tehuti.

BOOK ONE

I, thy God, am the Light and Mind, which were before Substance was divided from Spirit and Darkness from Light. And the word that appeared as a pillar of flame out of the Darkness is the Son of God, born of the mystery of the Mind. The name of the word is Reason. Reason is the offspring of Thought. Reason shall divide the Darkness from Light and establish Truth in the midst of waters. Understand, O Hermes, and meditate deeply on the mystery. So it is that Divine Light dwells in the midst of mortal darkness, and ignorance cannot divide them. The Union of the Mind and the World produces the mystery called Life … Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery; therein lies the secret of immortality.

—Meditation of Tehuti, an ancient Egyptian scribe, on immortality

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Shades of Honor

Chapter 2 Gandhi’s Principle, First Line of Assault

Chapter 3 Driven by Blind Madness, the Crucible

Chapter 4 Nearer, My God, to Thee

Chapter 5 The Blues Nth Expression Is a Good Man Loathing Himself

Chapter 6 Flowers of Sacrifice

Chapter 7 Desiree Meets Alan

Chapter 8 Conscience of a Benevolent Society

Chapter 9 Groovin’ High Naturally

Chapter 10 Hastings, North Carolina, and a Promise

Chapter 11 A Black Father Speaks of Coping

Chapter 12 Alicia, an Exemplary Expression of Mother Wit

Chapter 13 Good Night, Alan

CHAPTER ONE

SHADES OF HONOR

May 14, 1961

Early on a clear and balmy Mother’s Day Sunday, Desiree Pierson, an eighteen-year-old Temple University sophomore, and other Freedom Riders mingled with a hundred-fold crowd at Atlanta’s bus depot. Mostly black and white college students, professors, and teachers, they were members of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. In a cordoned-off area with two cross-country buses, the anxious bunch waited for the arrival of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer.

Five feet five and ideally proportioned with sharp cheekbones and elongated brown eyes in a narrow face, Desiree had been standing there for hours, believing it would all be worth it. She wore a faded, long-sleeve working man’s shirt and blue denim jeans. Desiree shifted her stance, trying to get more comfortable, as she shielded her eyes from the bright Georgia sun and peered ahead. Suddenly a loud whoop resounded. Pride and excitement rose in her heart. Along with the others, she clamored for position in the jammed area, trying to get close enough to touch the approaching Rev. King and Mr. Farmer, CORE executive director.

Not a tall man, of medium build, and mahogany complexioned with a thin mustache, intensely clear black eyes, and close-cropped hair, Rev. King was held in awe by the admirers. He wore a gray, blue, and black cotton polo shirt and dark blue trousers.

Desiree stood directly in Rev. King’s path. As their eyes met, his expression signaled to her that if she was indeed bold